by Ninie Hammon
They’d searched through five of the nine boxes when they came upon a box loaded with nothing but pictures. Hundreds of them! Pictures that dated back twenty-five years. There were shots of Jonas and Maggie right after they were married along with pictures of Melanie’s older brother and sister who had been killed in the war. It seemed that perhaps a box of old pictures had been dumped into another box of more current shots because the oldest were on top. When they hit the strata of pictures of Melanie growing up, Mac took them tenderly and spread them out on the floor.
Then two things happened at the same time. They found their first picture of Joy as a child. And a clap of thunder banged harsh and loud and the electricity went off.
The men sat in the dark, startled. The house was silent; Joy’s music had died in mid-wail. She hollered down from her room upstairs, “Daddy, what was that?”
“Lightning must have hit a utility pole, sugar,” Mac called back. “You want me to come up and bring a candle?”
“Don’t bother. I’m going to bed. ’Night Daddy, ’night Grandpa.”
“Don’t forget to turn off your hi-fi, or when the electricity comes back on, it’s going to go off like an alarm clock.”
So much for that heart-to-heart talk he’d been planning to have with Joy for three days now. It was only nine o’clock. Why was she going to bed so early? She’d been doing that a lot lately, seemed worn out all the time. But if she was sick, it obviously hadn’t affected her appetite. She looked like she’d put on a little weight, too. Her cheeks were fuller.
“I s’pose all the batteries in your flashlights are dead, right?” Jonas said. “They’re always dead in mine when I need ’em.”
“Matter of fact, I think I might be able to find one that works.” Mac stood and began to make his way across the dark living room. He returned in a few minutes with two flashlights and a handful of what Melanie called votive candles. He set them around on the coffee table and end tables, then went from one to the next, lighting them with wooden kitchen matches he struck on the gray stripe on the side of the box.
Soon, the room was aglow with flickering candlelight. Mac sat back down on the couch and reached for a handful of pictures that he would now have to look at one at a time with a flashlight.
Jonas reached over and touched his arm.
“Mac …”
Mac looked up. He sucked in his breath in a stifled gasp.
The floor of the room was a shimmering sea of shiny Melanie faces. The candlelight reflected off the glossy surfaces of the photographs Mac had set out of the box right before the electricity went out, creating a glimmering collage of images. Melanie as a little girl. As a teenager. At their wedding. Her senior picture. One image after another. Melanie. Melanie, Melanie. And the images fairly leapt off the floor every time lightning spilled into the room in a brief, blue-white glare.
Neither man spoke. They sat in silence, staring at a phenomenon they could never have created. Melanie was everywhere, all around them. Seemed so near Mac felt like he could reach out and touch her.
“You know what I used to do?” His voice was a ragged whisper. “I used to go out and sit in the car in the garage and scream. When Melanie was dying, I’d pound my fists on the steering wheel and yell until I was so hoarse I could barely talk. The car in the garage—that was the only place I could let go where nobody could hear me.”
“Everybody suffers in their own way.” Jonas sounded tired. And old. He’d always been so robust, so active that Mac never considered his age. But tonight, he looked and sounded every day of his seventy-four years.
“How do you deal with it, Jonas?”
“Well-meaning folks’ll say to me, ‘Oh, if that happened to me, I just couldn’t stand it!’ Or ‘I could never lose a child.’” His voice suddenly had a bitter edge Mac had never heard before. “It ain’t that you’re stronger’n other people. It’s just that when it happens to you, you ain’t got no choice but to stand it.”
He paused. “Princess understood that. She may be crazy, but she got that much. She talked ’bout how a body don’t get to pick what life gives ’em, I figure that woman had a hard row to hoe, don’t you?”
“She also said you do get to decide what you do about what life hands you.” Mac shook his head sadly and looked out over the sea of shiny Melanie faces. “The poor woman thinks she did decide, that she’s about to be punished for what she chose to do.” Mac sighed. “And it’s all illusion. I always wondered if crazy people knew they were crazy. I guess the answer’s no, they don’t.”
The electricity came back on in a sudden, blinding light. In the instant, bright glare of it, the aura of Melanie in the room, the sense of her presence vanished. Mac felt a stab of pain, profound and real. She’d felt so close and now she was gone again.
The men sat stunned for a moment. Mac heard the compressor in the refrigerator kick on but didn’t hear Joy’s hi-fi. She must have turned it off.
“Don’t guess we need these.” He indicated his flashlight and held out his hand for Jonas’s. “Give me yours and I’ll—”
“Mac, look.”
Jonas pointed into the box at a picture that now lay on the top of the pile, uncovered when Mac had grabbed a handful of pictures right before the electricity failed.
Mac reached into the box and took it out, and both men stared at it for a long time without speaking. The picture was a close-up shot of a naked child standing in a puddle of muddy water with her back to the camera. Clearly visible on her right butt cheek was a red spot with three red streaks spraying out above it. Like fireworks. Or a shooting star.
Mac looked from it to Jonas.
“You know, even with the uncanny resemblance between them, I might have been able to talk myself out of believing. Until now.” He shook his head in awe and wonder. “Princess really didn’t do it.”
“The poor woman out there at the penitentiary needs to be in a nut house somewhere, not in a cell a-fixin’ to die. You got to talk to that warden friend of yours, get him to put a stop to all this.”
Mac hadn’t processed the chain of events in his head that far out yet, and suddenly realized that Oran didn’t have the authority to refuse to impose the death penalty!
“Jonas, only the governor can grant a stay of execution. And on what grounds? What proof do we have?
“What about this picture?”
“This picture proves that my adopted daughter has a shooting star birthmark on her right butt cheek. So? Where could we possibly get proof that the little sister Princess supposedly killed had the same mark? And is that even proof—a birthmark? A birthmark’s not the same as fingerprints.”
Fingerprints. Mac froze.
He suddenly jumped up, ran out of the room and took the stairs two at a time to his upstairs bedroom. There was a cedar chest on the wall under the window. He moved the vase of artificial flowers off the top of it and the doily the vase had been sitting on, then lifted the heavy lid. The chest was made with partitioned drawer space in the top that swung out to reveal a big open area beneath.
Mac moved the drawers and shoved aside the “throws.” That’s what Malanie’d called them, hand-knit mini-blankets Maggie had made for her daughter over the years. He took out a stack of “for company” appliquéd pillowcases and sheets. Down in the very bottom of the chest was a small, wooden box. It was ornate, hand-carved. Mac had gotten it for Melanie in Korea and she’d always kept her greatest treasures there. He opened it slowly, reverently. There was a lock of curly hair the color of rust from Joy’s first haircut, the child’s first-grade report card, several small teeth the tooth fairy had purchased from the little girl for a dime slid under her pillow.
In the bottom of the box, enclosed in a layer of Saran Wrap, was a church visitor’s card. On the back of it, scrawled in that strange backward-slanted handwriting, were the words: “Got no plase for her so plees giv her a gud hom.”
Jonas spoke from the doorway. “Mac, what’d you come runnin’ up here for?”
Mac got to his feet and held up the card for Jonas to see. “This is the note that was laying on the pew beside Joy when we found her in the church that morning. From the moment Melanie picked it up and read it, she treated it like it was gold, immediately wrapped it in a clean, white handkerchief. That note was the only proof we had that the child had been abandoned—because Melanie knew from the moment she saw Joy that God had given her to us, an answer to prayer.”
“But what does that note—?”
“Melanie kept it wrapped in that handkerchief, then later wrapped it in plastic. Other than the judge during the adoption proceedings, nobody but Melanie ever touched it.”
Jonas still looked blank.
“Don’t you see—the person who wrote this note, her fingerprints could still be on it.”
“Fingerprints last that long, do they? All these years?”
“Beats me, I don’t know why they wouldn’t.” Mac looked hard at the note. “But there’s something else I know lasts that long—handwriting.”
He crossed to the doorway where Jonas was standing and switched on the bedside table lamp for better illumination. He held the note under the lamp.
“Have you ever seen stranger handwriting in your life?”
Jonas fished around in his pocket for his bifocals, parked them on his nose and held the note out at arm’s length from his face.
“No, can’t say as I have.”
“Compare this handwriting to Princess’s and—”
“How you goin’ to get a sample of her handwriting to compare it to?”
“I guess I’ll … well, I’ll just have to figure out a way to get her to write something down for me.”
Jonas straightened up.
“Mac, how you figure to get all this done in time? Come five o’clock tomorrow afternoon, they’re going to strap that little woman in—what’d you call it? Sizzlin’ Sadie?—and execute her.”
The inside of Mac’s head felt like a merry-go-round full of monkeys.
“I have to be sure before I get Oran involved in this! Have proof.” Mac didn’t know he had a plan until he heard himself begin to describe it. “I’ll go to him after my meeting with her tomorrow—”
“Morning?”
“On execution day, no visitors are allowed before noon or after 4 p.m.”
Jonas groaned.
“And I’ll explain it all and show him the handwriting samples. I’ll make him understand that all we need is time to have fingerprints lifted off the note. A day, just one day, and we can prove that Princess left her little sister alive in my church, that she just thinks she killed her.”
“Will he stop the execution if he believes you? I thought you just said he didn’t have the authority.”
Mac’s face lit up. “He may not have the authority, but he has something even better. A malfunctioning electric chair! He told me Monday the electric chair’s so old, it might not even work. I’m sure he’s got it up and running fine by now. But he could use that as an excuse. If he wanted to bad enough, he could delay the execution until after midnight. Then the state will have to ask the court for a new death warrant, which they can’t do until Monday morning when court’s in session. All we need’s a few hours.”
“Would Oran agree to that?”
Mac thought about it.
“For Princess, I think he might.” His voice hardened. “But if he won’t, I’ll make him. I’ll threaten him. I’ll tell him I’m going to march out to all those protesters at the front gate and tell them the story—tell them I can produce alive the person Emily Prentiss is about to be executed for murdering. No telling what those people would do with that kind of information! I’ll tell him I’m going to give a Pulitzer Prize-winning story to a reporter friend of mine, all about how the warden of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary for Women had proof a death row inmate was innocent and he executed her anyway.” The acid in his next words would have burnt a hole in boot leather. “I’ll tell him I will make it my life’s work to see to it he lands in a cell on the Long Dark himself, for the murder of Emily Gail Prentiss.”
“You’d do that?”
“Execution shouldn’t be the penalty for lunacy.”
Jonas put his hand on Mac’s shoulder. “I’ll go with you, son. We’ll do this together.”
Mac was so touched he didn’t trust himself to speak, just nodded, turned and headed back downstairs. At the front door, he gave the old man a hug goodbye instead of a handshake.
“If all my circuits weren’t so fried, I’d probably see some ironic humor in this,” he said with a little laugh. “Tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to keep the state of Oklahoma from killing Emily Prentiss, and at the elders’ meeting tomorrow night, I’m going to execute the Reverend David McIntosh.”
Jonas just shook his head and stepped out into the night. A moment later he was back. “Joy parked that car, that ‘Mr. Wilson,’ behind my truck; she’s got me blocked in.”
Joy’s purse was hanging by the front door. Melanie had gotten Mac to put up the “handbag hook” after Joy was late for school three times in one week because she couldn’t find her purse.
“Keys are in there,” Mac said and went into the living room to start cleaning up the mess of pictures and boxes. But when he looked up, Jonas was standing in the living room doorway.
“I didn’t mean to be nosey,” he said uncomfortably. “But this fell out when I pulled out the keys. Thought you might ought to see it.”
He held out a savings account passbook with a piece of paper stuck in it. Mac took the book, opened it and read the paper. It was a withdrawal slip. Joy had emptied out her savings account that afternoon. What did Joy need $100 for?
* * * * *
It didn’t do any good to stick her fingers in her ears. She’d tried that. The sound was coming from inside her head. Intellectually, she knew it was an auditory hallucination. She could quote the definition right out of a medical textbook, but the knowing didn’t change anything. The sound was still there. A baby was crying in the distance. A newborn, wailing pitifully.
Wanda Ingram slowly sat up, pulled the sheet back and turned to lower her feet to the floor. What was the point in staying in bed? The crying that had awakened her from her drug-induced stupor would keep her from going back to—
What was that? When her feet touched the floor, it was wet. There was water a couple of inches deep in her bedroom! Had the toilet overflowed? The water heater ruptured?
She reached for the bedside lamp, but had the presence of mind to lift her feet up off the floor before she touched the switch. She could be electrocuted touching a lamp with her feet in—
She flipped the switch.
And then she screamed. It was a horrified howl that ended in a little hiccup when she clamped her hand over her mouth.
Her floor wasn’t covered in water. It was covered in blood. Bright red blood. She could suddenly smell the copper stench of it, the reek, like wet pennies, peculiar to large amounts of fresh blood. She froze, sat with her feet stretched out in the air in front of her, staring at the bloody floor in wide-eyed horror.
Her breath came in hitching gasps, her hands began to shake violently. She turned quickly and scooted her feet back onto the bed. They smeared blood all over her sheets and on the pale pink chenille bedspread, the only thing besides a disfigured face she’d brought back with her from in Korea.
She shook her head back and forth slowly. No. This couldn’t be. It wasn’t really … She scooted back up against the headboard and grabbed it, as if her bed were a raft set adrift, floating all by itself in a sea of blood that was growing deeper by the second.
“It’s not real …” She whispered the words, then dragged in a ragged breath and chanted louder. “Not-real-not-real-not-real-not-real!”
She wanted to close her eyes, believed that if she’d just close her eyes and keep them closed for a few seconds, when she opened them again, the blood would be gone. But she couldn’t even make herself blink, let alone close he
r eyes.
The level of blood on the floor slowly rose, inched its way up the side of the dresser, swallowed the legs of the nightstand.
And the babies cried louder. The sound that had awakened her was the distant wail of a lone child. But the crying was no longer coming from a single child. More than one baby was crying now, each with a unique voice. Like a nursery full of newborns, all startled awake at one time.
It grew louder and louder!
Wanda clamped her hands over her ears and finally managed to squeeze her eyes shut. She screamed out in a shrieking wail, “Noooooo!”
The sound stopped instantly; replaced by an eerie silence.
Then a single baby began to cry, the ragged bark of a first breath. It wasn’t a distant sound, though. It was as if the baby were right there in the room with her, dragging air into its lungs for the first time and wailing its entrance into the world.
“There, there,” somebody whispered. “It’s Okay. Mamashere. Mamasgotcha. Shhhh.”
The soothing voice sounded familiar. Calming. And it quickly hushed the crying infant.
Wanda carefully opened her eyes.
There was no blood on the floor anymore, but the room had grown chilled.
Melanie McIntosh stood beside Wanda’s bed, cradling an infant in her arms. Wanda recognized the child. It was the little boy who had been born alive, the one who’d cried. The one whose neck she’d squeezed until he stopped crying, stopped breathing.
Melanie wore a white nightgown, with a high neck buttoned all the way up and long sleeves with lace on the cuffs. Her honey blond hair was longer than Wanda remembered it. It hung in curls on her shoulders.
She wasn’t looking at Wanda but down at the little baby in her arms. She shook it gently, that special way mothers do, and hushed it with her whispered, “Shhhhhhh.” The baby finally lay still in her arms and she lifted her eyes to Wanda.
“Don’t you just love to look at a sleeping baby?” she said. “So quiet and peaceful.”
Wanda stared at the woman who’d spoken to her, certain it was Melanie. And equally certain the apparition wasn’t real. Another, more elaborate hallucination. But the image seemed so real, so … Melanie. Perfect. No, not perfect. Something was off, different. Wanda couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was, but something wasn’t right.